Mimicking camera movement from the real world - After Effects Tutorial

- While we can add random camera movement by the use of expressions, sometimes the best camera movement comes from the real world. In this movie, we'll look at analyzing a clips camera movement to apply to a virtual one. So I'm here in my chapter three underscore eight composition, and we have our handy little logo, which is already 3D. What we want to do is kind of create some real world camera movement, maybe a handheld feel as we zoom out of this logo. One great way to do that, is to take your existing footage that you have from cameras, analyze the movement that's in that shot, and apply it to a virtual camera. Now here's how you can set that up. I have a piece of iPhone footage just above this and we're going to, first of all, turn it on. And if you look here, in this shot, I am just sort of moving out handheld. In fact I'll just play back this shot so we can see the movement. Quite a windy day. But what we would like to do, is analyze the motion in this shot, particularly on this steady area here of the window. After effects allows us a really easy way to do that. And that is with the shot selected, I'll come to the animation menu and track the camera. What happens is, in the background, the effect is added, a 3D camera tracker. And we can see here that it's going to analyze the movement in this shot. How I know the process is taking place is I look at the initialization feature. Within a couple of seconds it's going to start up and start analyzing this shot frame by frame. So I want to let it go through its process and we're going to pick this up where we're going to have to pick some points that we would like to essentially create our virtual camera with. So it goes through the process of solving the camera, and what this is going to do is supply us with a series of tracking points. I'm going to move forward, so we can see these tracking points a little bit clearer. They're quite small, but one great thing we can do is, under the camera tracker, just make them bigger, so we can actually see these points. Now what we would love to do is kind of go through this footage and make sure it's, whatever point you pick, exists pretty much for the majority of the shot. So, in looking at these points, I see that I have some reliable ones here on the window sill, as well as just over here at the side. It seems that some of these points, in particular or specifically with the window sill, save up for the majority of this shot. And that's exactly what I want, is that kind of reliable camera movement. Once you pick a reliable point, you can grab onto it, and we will create a null and a camera. But really what we really want is just the virtual camera. And the cool thing is even if I turn off this layer, we'll see that we essentially have a series of camera points still. Let me just click off of it. But what we have is a virtual camera moving through the space. And the cool thing here is as I move throughout eventually this camera kind of goes back and reveals where my logo is, but the cool part about it is that we have this natural camera movement that is taken from an iPhone. So, what happens if we want to see this logo a little bit more throughout the shot? What we want to do is really just sort of push it forward in space. The best way to sort of see this is I'm going to to two views horizontal, and we will take a look at this from the top view. I'm going to make sure that my camera and these parts of the logo are all framed together, because I want to show you what's going on. We see here that here is the camera, that's going through 3D space and then there is where our logo is in 3D space. All the way back here, in the top view. So if you want to see more of it, all you have to do is select all of the elements of the logo in this case. And I will push it forward. And now we've got this logo revealed a little bit earlier, and we can see that it tracks it through its process. And if I want that even earlier, grab onto this logo, position this back in 3D space. Now it's starting at the four second mark. And you can see as we move throughout the scene, we're sort of following this camera movement. And we have that now attached to a virtual camera, so keep in mind you could add additional layers to this scene, additional logos, and basically have that real world camera movement, in this case taken directly from an iPhone.